“…the loneliness of the human soul is unendurable; nothing can penetrate it except the highest intensity of the sort of love that religious teachers have preached; whatever does not spring from this motive is harmful, or at best useless; it follows that war is wrong, that a public school education is abominable, that the use of force is to be deprecated, and that in human relations one should penetrate to the core of loneliness in each person and speak to that.”

Bertrand Arthur William Russell, 3rd Earl Russell
18 May 1872 – 2 February 1970

“The listener must be gripped and—whether he likes it or not—drawn into the flight path of the sounds, without a special training being necessary. The sensual shock must be just as forceful as when one hears a clap of thunder or looks into a bottomless abyss.”

“I believe that music should be collective hysteria and spells, violently of the present time.”

John R. “Johnny” Cash
26 February 1932 – 12 September 2003

The great man would have turned 91 today.  Any comment of mine would be superfluous.

23 February 1944 – 29 December 2001

At its highest level film music becomes an equal player in the drama, with a particular capacity to engage the viewer’s feelings and insinuate the deep, unspoken meanings of a film. The early masterpieces of Werner Herzog, such as Aguirre Zorn Gottes, shorn of the music of Florian Fricke, would be as impoverished as Hitchcock without Herrmann, Fellini without Rota or Leone without Morricone. Fricke’s early death was a great loss to the true art of cinematic Music.

“The music of its style contrasts with the almost ineffable brutality of certain scenes. One of the stories, — “Salt” — enjoys a glory seemingly reserved for poems and rarely attained by prose: many people know it by heart.”
–Jorge Luis Borges praises Red Cavalry

“…his trial took place on January 26, 1940, in one of Lavrenti Beria’s private chambers. It lasted about twenty minutes. The sentence had been prepared in advance and without ambiguity: death by firing squad, to be carried out immediately. Babel had been convicted of ‘active participation in an anti-Soviet Trotskyite organization,’ and of ‘being a member of a terrorist conspiracy, as well as spying for the French and Austrian governments.’ Babel’s last recorded words in the proceedings were, ‘I am innocent. I have never been a spy. I never allowed any action against the Soviet Union. I accused myself falsely. I was forced to make false accusations against myself and others… I am asking for only one thing — let me finish my work.’ He was shot the next day and his body was thrown into a communal grave.”
–Nathalie Babel Brown, on her father’s death

Camille Goemans, André Breton, Jacques Prévert, Yves Tanguy

Mort aux vaches!
André Breton, Valentine Hugo, Yves Tanguy, Benjamin Péret, c. 1930

Hans Arp, Marcel Jean, Oscar Dominguez, Raoul Hausmann,
Sophie Taeuber-Arp, 1936

Earl “Fatha” Hines
28 December 1903 – 22 April 1983

One of the true originators of jazz, Hines joined the virtuosity of Tatum to the eccentricity of Monk, anticipating both. He was a man filled to overflowing with music and I would without a moment’s hesitation name him the greatest of all jazz pianists.